


Pilgrim's Hands

by Siria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Challenge: sticksandsnark, F/M, POV Character of Color, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-20
Updated: 2008-04-20
Packaged: 2017-10-03 14:17:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had taken Teyla some time to grow used to life on Atlantis; not just to the new responsibilities it brought to her, this chance to take the fight to the Wraith in a way her people could never have managed alone, but to the strange and staccato rhythms of life in a city on the sea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pilgrim's Hands

**Author's Note:**

> Pinch hit for [misskatieleigh](http://misskatieleigh.livejournal.com/) for the sticksandsnark challenge, for the prompt 'Rodney and Teyla and cultural differences.'

It had taken Teyla some time to grow used to life on Atlantis; not just to the new responsibilities it brought to her, this chance to take the fight to the Wraith in a way her people could never have managed alone, but to the strange and staccato rhythms of life in a city on the sea. These new Lanteans had sought this planet out, but they lived curiously divorced from it: they did not rise with its sun and retreat to the safety of their dwellings when it set; they planted no crops and harvested no grains; they did not track deer on cautious feet through the forests, or accompany herds of _mital_ along the great, elliptical routes of their migrations year on year. Teyla sometimes had the feeling that if she stopped someone in the corridors and asked them about the drought that had settled over the southern mainland for the past two months, they would blink at her in confusion: the concerns of the world around them were always less important than those of the sky above them.

Stranger than that, they lived apart from one another. Teyla knew that part of it was a natural consequence of the layout of the city's living quarters; the Ancestors had favoured spare, cell-like rooms where they could retreat for solitary sleep, for the necessities of bathing, to sate the urge towards sex. But the Lanteans kept to them much more than Teyla imagined the Ancestors ever would have, and spent long hours by themselves: all of them in a row of rooms in single file the length of the curving corridors, John sleeping alone next to Rodney, Rodney sleeping alone next to Radek, Radek sleeping alone next to Elizabeth, on and on and apart.

Fresh from the forests of Athos, from a life spent in tents set close to one another for safety and comfort, where tent flaps were never kept closed for fear of cutting off talk, or music, or the simple reassurance of watching people as you sat at your own work, being shown to her own quarters by John and being left there, alone, during her first days in the city had struck Teyla as unnatural. More than that, it had made her sad for them; she could not comprehend how they could stay together and not fall apart.

The Ancestors must have felt the same: for all their asceticism of body, their attempts to purge the mind, they had built great public spaces throughout their city where they must have come together each day: rooms that could hold hundreds and still have room for the white light of the sun, prismed into a dozen different colours through windows of gorgeous stained glass; areas with ceilings that spiralled upwards and upwards so that you could do nothing but tilt your head backward and look. Teyla sought them out, made a map in her mind of the most remote of them, outposts of community that lay at the end of one of the piers, or in a remote tower for which neither the military nor the science teams had found any use. They were ideal for meditation, for allowing Teyla to find a sense of her own stillness in echoing, amber rooms; she would count her own heartbeats and feel certain that, if she listened just so, she could hear the footfalls of the Ancestors, the lilting inflection of their voices, how they wove around one another to create a tapestry of belonging, a shared striving for ascension.

The Lanteans had the mess hall, where they gathered when hunger compelled them: morning, midday and evening, and with the exception of those nights when her team was sleepless, or the evenings which marked an Earth festival, no one lingered over their meals. She had mentioned it to Elizabeth once, some months after she had first arrived; tried to find the clearest way to phrase her questions, to find the best way in to the culture of a world she had never seen. Elizabeth didn't seem to have understood what she was trying to ask, though; her face had lit up with what Teyla had swiftly come to realise was a linguist's enthusiasm for learning new words and concepts, for parsing out the difference in Athosian between _mena_ in falling tones, 'a tent', and _mena_, rising, 'a home'. Teyla had swiftly lost any desire to say that no, what she wanted was to understand what things meant in the English; what the positioning of their bodies, the place where they lay their head at night, meant to these new Lanteans. Instead, she had repressed a sigh, and answered Elizabeth's questions, and promised to write out more of her people's stories so that Elizabeth could pin them to paper and study for meaning in the dead letters.

John would understand what she was saying, she knew, but he would not want to answer her questions. Might not be able to, not with the stiff way he held himself, the careful way he responded to touch as if it were something too precious to rely on; she thought he might be grateful for such a curious way of living. Later, when she learnt more about John's family, about the wife who had left him so that he could not leave her, she thought she understood him better; she thought she understood all of the Lanteans better. Here, then, was the clue.

In her idle moments, she would sit in the mess and watch them, seeing the reflection of how they lived in how studiously they avoided touching one another. Here, at meal times, the times when people should be most together, some of them seemed furthest apart. Soldiers sat with soldiers; scientists sat with scientists; all of them lined up neatly in rows and all of them unconsciously careful to make sure that legs did not meet underneath the table, or elbows press against elbows above it, some of them seeking companionship in the book which they held open with one hand while they ate with the other. There were some exceptions, of course, with couples who were still in the first flush of learning one another's bodies, and Teyla smiled to see it: to see how one's fingers turned clumsy when close to the other's body, how feet would rub against feet through the barrier of the ugly, manufactured shoes all the Lanteans wore.

Over time, she was not surprised to see that Rodney was the only one who did not fit in neatly with what she saw: Rodney rarely bided by the rules, unless they had to do with his beloved physics, and here was no exception. Where Elizabeth asked Miko to pass the salt cellar, Rodney stretched across the table to take it. When he was still dating Katie Brown, more often than not he would sit stiffly and formally with her at the table, and eat diligently in an attempt _not_ to talk: a very unusual thing for Rodney. And while John shifted his chair just slightly to the left each time Teyla sat down to his right, Rodney would lean in to her to ask a question, speaking around the wad of bread in his mouth and his elbow jostling hers as he ate his bowl of spiced stew.

"Manners, McKay," John would drawl, his nose wrinkling a little, and Rodney would say "Sorry, sorry", eyes rolling and tone exasperated, but Teyla truly didn't mind. It made her think of being back in the central gathering tent in high summer, too many people sweating around too small a table, joking as they broke great, round loaves of bread and ate tart, fresh-gathered _niima_ berries. There was little pain in such remembrances, and much joy; so she would always smile at Rodney, and lift her eyebrows at John, and say "Truly, I do not mind."

Ronon would snort, and Rodney would _hmpfh_, and sometimes even shift away a little, but always he would move back to sit next to her: his solid form warm against her at the dinner table, or in a cave on Esepra's dying moon, or in the back of the puddlejumper, his hands fluttering over her, anxious and determined, while she concentrated on her breathing and tried to ignore the blood. He didn't hold himself apart from her as so many others did: for Rodney, there were no barriers with those he had recognised as his own, and as she lay in the infirmary, mind slow and thoughts befuddled from the morphine Jennifer had given her, more often than not she would blink to see Rodney sitting next to her, working on his tablet or talking on his earpiece to someone in the gate room, or simply sleeping slumped over on her bed, his forehead resting next to her leg and his hand warm and dry covering hers.

Teyla told him through parched lips that he should go back to his own room. Even the narrow, hard bed there would surely be more comfortable than he was here, doubled over in his chair with all the evening bustle of the infirmary hardly muffled by the thin material of the screen drawn around her bed. "No," Rodney told her sleepily, his hair rumpled by sleep and the imprint of her blanket on his cheek, "'m comfy here."

"Rodney," Teyla croaked, but he muttered something about _no, right here_, and fell back asleep, his head lolling against her thigh. In the morning, he complained vociferously—_bitched_, John said, while Ronon smirked—about his back, but he reddened pleasantly when Teyla thanked him for his company. It would have been a long night to spend disoriented and alone, she told him, with none of her family with her.

He touched her a little more after that; nothing obvious, nothing that would have made John raise an eyebrow, or made Ronon threaten to beat Rodney up. But something in the way she spoke must have registered with him, some tone in her voice conveyed that closeness, that having people tight around her, was something she missed. Now his fingertips would glance against her forearm when he needed her attention; his hands were warm against the nape of her neck when he helped her tie on a necklace of Smernyl glass with fingers used to fine work; when he was working with her to realign crystals in the jumper before they crashed, his whole body brushed against hers, and Teyla had to pretend that it was John's yells from the front of the craft which made her jump, not the curve of Rodney's neck seen close up.

She had regretted not having people close, at having so much empty space surround her when there should only have been her people, children, laughter. But Rodney, Rodney could fill up entire rooms without effort; his voice carried strong to her ears over the fresh breeze when they sat outside together on her balcony, him reading a thick paperback book for leisure, her picking out the beginning of the epic song-cycle of Keriss and Lemet on her four-stringed rebedd; he did not hold himself apart.

It was not something she had lost when she came to Atlantis, she realised; it was merely something she had had to negotiate for herself, rules she had had to learn, just as in any trade negotiation with a new ally. The Lanteans did not want to hold themselves apart; it seemed that they just often did not know how to ask how they could come together. So Teyla kissed Rodney first, curled her hands around the nape of his neck and the shockingly fragile curve of his skull and pulled him down to her mouth. She kissed him hot and wet and determined, one last wall between them that Teyla overcame, the existence of which Rodney seemingly ignored, though she could detect a stutter in his breathing, a tremble in the hand that came up to cup her face.

"Teyla," he said, eyes heavy-lidded when she pulled away, and his voice was hoarse and breathless.

"Here," she murmured, and then it was time for skin on skin, for the scratch of his leg hair against her inner thigh. He spoke words against her mouth, painted signs and symbols on her skin with the very tips of his fingers, and when he pushed inside her slowly, so slowly, she knew that Atlantis was truly more than _mena_, falling tones, a place of temporary refuge; here in this city, unexpectedly and wondrously, she had found _mena_, rising, rising, a home.


End file.
